With Malice by Eileen Cook

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Once again I was suckered into a novel that is unapologetically a fictionalized account of the Amanda Knox story (with slight, and I meant very slight, deviations – you might as well call the main character Bamanda Clox). This rendering also took place in Italy, but changed up the actual cause of death, with the focus being on a fatal car crash instead of death by stabbing alone. But please don’t fret – the victim still was stabbed a few times for good measure. Don’t fix it if it ain’t broke, am I right?

I appreciate how this novel was constructed, with accounts from multiple individuals involved using social media excerpts, police interviews, television appearances etc., along with chapters focusing solely on the main character in present day, just weeks after the “accident” took place as she is on her way to facing a possible murder charge. But taking a page out of the ever popular domestic thriller genre, she has accident induced amnesia and cannot remember any of the events surrounding the death of her best friend and roommate. Did she purposely kill her friend in a jealous rage or was it truly an unfortunate car wreck? No one, not even the main character, knows. Dun, dun, dun!

The book has an open for interpretation ending and sets up multiple “truths” by giving us conflicting information as we learn more about the girls and the details of their ill-fated Italy trip. We don’t even know if the main character is really suffering from amnesia at all (kind of a spoiler… opps), so that adds an additional layer. Not that the unreliable narrator is a new concept by any means, considering 90% of all books and movies use this as a tactic these days, but the fact that we have no reason to suspect her of this until the end of the novel - literally the last page - is clever.

Yes there are cliché situations and cardboard cutout characters, but I suppose that can be expected from a novel that is really banking on being a quick and interesting topical read and not a deeply groundbreaking work of literature. It isn’t the best rendition of this straight-out-of-the-headlines storyline I’ve read, but I am willing to bet it’s also not the worst.



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